The Journey of an Automotive Expert with Aaron Stokes

While the future is scary, it's worth stepping into. Just trust and embrace it. Think about your past. You've never regretted how far you've come. So let's now start now. Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields, like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership, to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the Home Service Millionaire, Tommy Mello. Before we get started, I wanted to share two important things with you. First, I want you to implement what you learned today. To do that, you'll have to take a lot of notes, but I also want you to fully concentrate on the interview. So I asked the team to take notes for you. Just text notes, N-O-T-E-S, to 888-526-1299. That's 888-526-1299. And you'll receive a link to download the notes from today's episode. Also, if you haven't got your copy of my newest book, Elevate, please go check it out. I'll share with you how I attracted and developed a winning team that helped me build a $200 million company in 22 states. Just go to elevateandwin.com, slash podcast, to get your copy. Now, let's go back into the interview. All right, guys. Welcome back to the Home Service Expert. Today, I got Aaron Stokes with me. He's a buddy of mine. I was with him about, well, last week, he's an expert in sales business based out of Franklin, Texas, founder of Auto Repair, or Auto Fix, and Shop Fix Academy, 25-year veteran of the automotive repair industry who uses expertise and experience to help other auto repair shop owners build successful businesses. He provides innovative management, coaching, and trained based on knowledge and acquired growth of the automotive repair. Your Auto Fix, Auto Fix, and Mike's Automotive. The list goes on and on. But you also do a broadcast radio show, Fixing Cars with Aaron Stokes. And you just had a huge event. Yep, we sure did. And it is Franklin, Tennessee, not Franklin, Texas. I got to correct this. Oh, Franklin. It is Tennessee. I just read it wrong. I knew. I know where you lived because I was just there. Yeah. Hey, you're not telling the pilot where to go. You're just like, just get me there. No, yeah. The event went awesome. We had a great time. So you have how many people? The same one you spoke at. What's that? The same one you spoke at last year. Yep. No, it looked amazing. How many people were there? Almost 2,000. 2,000. And how many people do you have in your coaching program, companies? Oh, gosh. I have, I'm roughing it here, 800 services. I have about 1,000,000 advisors, about 1,800 technicians, 1,200 owners, 1,600 locations. And I think we're tickling 3.6 billion in revenue that we're coaching now. And tell us the story. I know you grew up kind of like I grew up. And you went through the automotive. You bet everything. I love your story. Yeah, I'll give you kind of the short reader's digest. But yeah, I'm a eighth grade education, no high school education. Never went to college. Went to work full time. Did remodeling. Did construction, like a lot of your people do. And knew how to work on stuff. And I found myself buying and flipping cars, doing it in a little barn behind my single-wide trailer. Had recently got married and was there with my wife. Having babies and doing the deal. And 21 years old when I got started. Eventually got to work in town. Got my second location. And then got my third location. Then got into car sales. Then had a car sales manager steal from me. Lost over a million dollars. That set me way back. Talked me a lot. And then people started asking me to help them. I started giving some advice here and there. And then before you know it, I had people started asking me more aggressively. So then I shot my first course on a cell phone. And I think that first course, it's still out there. So I mean, yeah, that first course made me millions just teaching that. It was crazy. And made a lot of other people millions. And then the coaching came. And then the systems came. And then everything kind of came together and built it into what it is today. I've got multiple businesses on the automotive side. I've got the coaching side. And then a bunch of other accessory businesses all around that. All in probably, I don't know, $75,000,000,000. And then 340 employees and contractors now working for me. And then I met my wife on the internet in 1996. They did not exist back then. I was on comp you serve in a chat room. And so yeah, I met my wife back then. So a lot of weird, little one-off stories around this that kind of got me to where I am today. But I'm very thankful. And it's God's grace that we haven't burned it down yet. So yeah, it's the super, super short version. There's a lot more detail to it. But I will say anybody out there who's been stolen from, I know how you feel. That's a special feeling of violation that cannot be described. And I think just by every small business owner, including you and all of us out there, if you don't have your business ran tight, you don't have your financials tight and your systems tight, you were being stolen from. Either a lot or hopefully very, very little. But we are all at some point being stolen from. When you started this, one of the things I've noticed is people don't really know their numbers. I've noticed a lot of distrust when people would come until they saw my shop. They looked at the numbers. They saw decimal points. They saw every single thing from the way we do things. There was a budget. We know exactly our booking rate. We know our conversion rate. We know where we need to work on the business. Where do you think you got the first buy-in? What was the like, aha, where everybody's like, man, this guy has got to figure it out. And that attracted a lot of people to you. Number one, my ability to speak. I'm good on stage. And I think any leader who wants to lead a fast growing organization needs to be able to speak. You're self included. You can speak, you know. And if you can't get in front of your team and say, look, it really sucks out there, but we're about to go knock that wall down. And we are going to overcome. We are going to figure this out. We are going to pull together. We are going to be a team. And in loan out confidence, 0% to your team. I don't think that you can grow. I think you have to be able to oritate. You have to be an orator. You have to stand up, speak the future as if it is the truth today, right now, like it's happening right now. And I've seen you do it. And every successful business owner I know who's been through hard times has had to master that. So I think that was the number one thing that drew people to me. As far as systems, 2008, we had the cash for clunkers hit. And cash for clunkers, you know, while it didn't affect a lot of other people, the automotive industry, it really screwed up because it forced in a down economy all of the new car manufacturers just to boom. For us, it took a massive amount of work off the streets. All these cars got trashed in, or I'm sorry, traded in and crushed, which made no sense because then the used car market got in trouble because all the poor people had no cars to buy. And then on top of that, all of us had a major downturn in auto repair. It was about a 25% average across the country. Mostly, that's pretty conservative. Some guys felt it 10%, 15%. Some felt it 40%, 50%. When that happened, I had to sit down and come up with formulas. And those formulas that I now teach today, I had heard about gross profit per hour, but I didn't really understand it. And so for example, for you and anybody else who's operating out of a truck or van, I know it's not all home service guys. Maybe some of you builds a deck. They're at a job for a week. But if you're doing small jobs and you're driving, I need to know my gross profit per hour, my overhead cost hour, my net hour, and my sales hour. In my overhead cost hour, I've kind of nicknamed that OUCH, O-H-C-H. OUCH, overhead cost hour. I want to know what every hour when I'm in front of a customer cost me. And so that means if I'm driving, if I'm one of your techs, Tommy, between houses, I'm not getting paid. You're not getting paid. But when I'm at the house, I'm getting paid. But that overhead that you just paid me to drive the van, drive the truck, for 20 minutes to get to Mrs. Jones's house, has to be allocated somewhere on the P&L. There's insurance. There's gas. There's wear and tear on the tire. That is all pushed onto Mrs. Jones's appointment. So Mrs. Jones's appointment doesn't just pay me for standing there and working. It also pays me for driving there and pays the girl who sent a booth, who took the call, that booked it, et cetera, et cetera. So I need to know that overhead cost hour. So I know that my gross profit per hour is always above that at all times. And so what will happen is a lot in auto repair, the term 60% gross profit is kind of the standard. The problem with that is it doesn't account for gross profit per hour. So I'll do an example and try to relate it to maybe HVAC or plumbing or garage doors. So let's say that a guy shows up, fixes something in an hour in your world. And he has a part, whether it is a garage door, motor, a panel, a disposer for a plumber or a compressor for an HVAC guy or whatever. But they show up and we can't do a compressor. Let's just say maybe it's a board or something, something that doesn't require EVAC and recharge it for you. They show up and they do the deal. And they leave. They're only there an hour. Well, let's say we're paying the tech $30 an hour. And let's say that we're charging the customer $100 an hour for just easy math. That's $70 in gross profit dollars on the labor side. But we might dig into it and find out that your overhead alone was $150. So the $70 of gross profit that came in doesn't get close to covering that. So then we have to look at the parts. What did we sell the customer? Well, if we sold the customer something that we bought for $100, that we resold for $500. Now, that's a lot of markup, but I'm just using it for an example. That's a $400 parts gross profit or materials gross profit. So what I tell people is what is the gross profit in total? And they go, well, it's $400. Well, and plus the hourly, so that we paid the technician, that's $70, so $470 is my gross profit. And you did that with one hour. And they're like, yeah, one hour. I said, so let's imagine you got a camel walking across the desert. My goal is to load that camel up. He represents one hour with as much crap as I possibly can. Parts, materials. Because if each technician is a storefront, we have to make sure that we are selling through that technician for every hour he's working. So he gross profited $470. Our overhead cost was $200. That means our net should have been $270. So in one hour, the company net profited $270. Well, let's flip it. If we stop and think about it, the gross profit on that job may have been high, may have been low. But what if it hit the minimum 60% GP, at least an automotive that we shoot for? You might say, dude, that was awesome. Well, there's some jobs that'll fool you. For us, if I have a Dodge diesel roll-in, it's a head gasket. Or if I have a guy roll in and he wants to do a rear main seal. And it's eight hours of labor and $150 an hour. And it's a $30 part, something like that. I'm selling tons of hours, tons of camels, right, that are designed to carry a load with no parts. So these camels are walking across the desert carrying nothing. So this technician is working all day carrying nothing. I got a bay right next to it with a technician. And he's going to do a job. And he's going to go, listen, man, this customer, Mrs. Jones, she needs a computer for her Camry. She needs an ECM. And so the ECM is going to run $1,400. And we're going to pay $1,000 for it. One hour of labor to install and program it. And we're like, OK. So we're only making $400 in gross profit. But if you do the math, if I was to stop and think about it, if I pay $1,000 for something, so $1,000, and I divide that by $1,400, I've got a 29% gross profit. That's low. And even with some labor gross profit, it's still low. So we're all going to ask everybody, would you do this job? Would you do this job? Most will say no. But this is where gross profit in total, if you take P&L math and apply it to this, is lying to you. Because gross profit by the hour, he just made me $400. Bought the computer for $1,000. So $1,400, maybe $400. And if I paid him one hour, and he cost me $30 an hour, and I made $70, he made me $470. And he did it in one hour. So while the gross profit on the job may suck, gross profit, maybe the whole thing with even labor, maybe it's 34%, but gross profit by the hour is amazing. And what I see is most business owners confuse P&L math with repair order math. P&L math is when you lump all of your materials, all of your sublet, all of your labor into those three categories. And then we take all of the revenue that came in, and we get to keep the difference. But when it comes to just the actual repair order, each job must stand on its own, and you don't treat it with normal gross profit. You actually have to do it by the hour. And when I came in and started doing that, it revolutionized everything. I started telling people, you don't have to hit 60% in GP. Guys, this dude went and wrote a six-page article on me, entire monthly magazine, saying how I had destroyed the auto industry, and I was the most harmful thing, and broke down all of his math, and while I was wrong, he didn't understand what I'm telling you now. He didn't have a clue. And so when you really stop and think about it, it doesn't matter if you're a plumber, it doesn't matter if you're an electrician, a garage, a door repairman, a mechanic, a body shop guy, it didn't matter, a doctor even. Gross profit by the hour, when you're doing the job is the only way you measure profitability. Gross profit totals are done only in a monthly profit and loss format. That's it. I was on a podcast probably eight years ago, and this guy from Australia sent me this form, and it was a really outdated one, but he had the yellow book, he had all the pagers, he had kind of archaic stuff, but he goes, look, I figured out, this is the most you can get a guy working if he's driving to the shop to get his truck. He's driving to the job, then you gotta figure out his lunch break, and this was very old, it was late 90s, the math. And he goes, to make a profit, you need to charge $400 an hour labor in the home. In the 90s. Yeah, that was in the home, because a lot of people are like, I see these Facebook groups and these guys that are still working out of their house, and they're like, well, shoot, if I only paid $70 for the part, like if I paid $30 for a capacitor, and I charge 400, I'm making, you know, 370 bucks. But they never figure out the insurance, the wear and tear on the vehicle, the CRM, that your wife's working for free, your son's the job guy that you're paying 10 bucks an hour or two. And the argument I always had is most companies, they argue that you might be charging too much, but the most they pay is $55,000. They don't have any benefits. And I always say, you screw your employees over to give your customers a good deal, and you're really only making a living. You're not building enterprise value for your business. 100%. And the worst part is that same person says, there's no good employees, no one wants to work for me. I can't find anybody, can't service the customers that are beaten on the door. So then they want to market when they can't even take care of who's calling now, because they think, oh, I just have a slow time this week. I need to start marketing. Wait a second. Last week though, you were blown out, you told five people no. And the way they say no is they don't actually say no. They say, can you wait a couple of days? Well, somebody's HVAC, I mean, let's be real, in your town in Phoenix, nobody's waiting, in Nashville, Tennessee, the rest of the community, nobody's waiting. They want somebody now. So you have to be able to say yes. So you have to staff to be able to say yes. So not only do you want to take care of your employees, to take care of your customers, you actually have to staff where you want to be, which means to a degree, you're giving up net profit to get to that next level. And there's a place, don't get me wrong, where you level off and you're able to scrape that cream off the top. But people have to understand that every business is probably out there surviving in spite of us. As owners, we're always trying to kill our business, kill our business, kill our business. And somehow the stupid thing just keeps surviving. And we all look around and we're like, I went and looked at a shop yesterday, I could not believe how bad it was. It had premium luxury and everything on the outside, total dump. It's the nicest sign in the world, total dump. And I think that people don't get this, they don't understand, you have to charge right for the customer, not just for the customer, but for the employee that you're taking care of and for the customer to have a better experience. Because that 55K guy you're talking about versus the 90K guy, the 55K is gonna, who knows what he's gonna say? And let's be real, who cost you the most money? The 90K or the 55K? Yeah, the 55K. The 55K is the one that breaks everything, screws up. You keep them around for years because what do we all tell our spouses and our other employees? He's only 55 grand, I mean, we can't fire him, he's cheap. But the 90K guy, he screws up one thing, you fire him. That's the thing, it's a double standard. People don't understand that. They are literally holding themselves down and the business is fighting, trying to grow without even any marketing. That's the crazy part. And then when they do market and don't increase staff to handle what they are honestly every time shocked by, which is customers calling, like holy crap, the marketing actually worked because they don't have any more staff. They have to tell everybody, no, it's just another tax on the business and it just makes more broke. You know, I had a guy, a good buddy of mine who works for me now again. He worked for me, top player. And you know the prima donna syndrome, they think, man, you must be making all this money. He left on good terms. A guy offered him 10% of the company. So he went over there and he's crushing it. He's just, but the guy can only be keeping busy for a couple of jobs a day. And he's texting me. He's like, I just closed another 5,000, just closed another 9,000. And the guy said, when you're not working, you're gonna come here and sweep the floors and mob. And this is one of the top guys in my company at the time, never got his equity. And what he missed the most was the infrastructure, the brotherhood, the knowing his numbers. And the fact is that I kept him busy. More than anything, he was busy. He didn't wait around for jobs. He wasn't having to sweep floors. And he said, I didn't know what I had. And that's the best testament is I've had about five guys in my whole company history the last two decades, top performers that left on good terms, that came back and said, the grass isn't greener. And you know, people are always trying to steal, thinking it's the people. Well, really what it is is the leadership of, of like, how do you perform in front of your people? And do you get behind them? And do you explain these things? Because I think a lot of people wonder, well, if I'm a top performer and they don't know the math and how important would you say it is that you inform your mechanics of why? Cause they must think you're rolling in gold, man. They must think you take, you know, showers and like, wow, they're charging this. I know what the parts cost. I know what they pay me. But I don't think they really understand what the rent is and how much these hoists take to take care of and what it costs to get the front, the front line. Do you ever spend time with the staff kind of? We share the profit and loss with the managers and the managers explain it to the staff. And then in the old days, I just pinned the P&L on the wall and everybody's like, holy crap, look at all those line items. All that stuff costs money. If you do a hundred grand in a month, they think you cleared 90, you know? That's what they always say. They always believe that. But you know, to your grass is greener comment, dude, people don't understand grass is only greener where they water it. And AstroTurf exists. And people will claim the grass is greener and they get there and they realize it's AstroTurf and it's not what they thought. What we have to make sure that our team members understand is that we are giving them our all to create an amazing workplace. And when they do go over there and then they come back, for you Tommy, you want that guy telling everybody, this is the best, this is the best. I've been somewhere else. I've come back, I know. And I will tell everybody out there, it's gonna happen. You can't stop it. People are gonna leave, they're gonna come back, you can't stop it. However, you can do the best job you can being the best workplace you possibly can. So if they do leave, they desperately want to come back and be mature. Don't give them attitude when they walk out. Don't say a bunch of crap. Treat them with respect. Because at the end of the day, you do hopefully return. You do hope that that ends up working out. I had some very, very bad experiences with people that have left and I've had some great ones. I'm sure you as well. You wanna always take the high road. Their behavior does not dictate my reaction. My core values dictate my reaction. And so I'll go, you know what, hey, God bless you. That's what you wanna do. If that guy's gonna give you equity, okay, whatever. But I'm gonna make sure my guys have an AC shop. They've got the best reviews. They have amazing parts managers. They have amazing sales teams. We have an amazing marketing budget. The shop has an amazing reputation and they are busy. Even if I paid $2 less an hour, my shop has so many hours coming through. That's how mechanics work. We are so busy. They make more money working for me than they will work. Making, or they will make working for anybody else. And that sounds like it's that guy discovered with you. He may have gotten paid more per job, but he didn't make more money. He made less money and he probably came back to you because of that. And so I think that a lot of owners, they don't understand our job is to create a culture for them to succeed, not for us to succeed. We get to succeed as a byproduct. Our job is to connecting of the five things, right? We're connecting the landlord, because you're leasing a building or I'm leasing a building or somebody, or we become the landlord, whatever. We're connecting the parts manufacturers. Then we connect sales people. Then we connect the technician all with the customer. And then our job is to make the spread. So we got to get everybody to come together and work together as a team. And then we get what's left over. And that works if you do it right. You do it wrong, then you take all the risk. And while you end up owing everybody else, and you don't get anything back. It sounds like you've really understand the deepest level of finance. And I think the hard part for most companies that I find is you don't know my market. You don't understand. People aren't going to spend that kind of money here. And I've heard it. I mean, I'm in almost 40 markets. And wherever I send my top 50 guys, their numbers never change. It's the same price book throughout every single market. And I know people might say, well, Wichita, Kansas is a little bit different than LA or whatever. But I found that to not be true. And I think the biggest, hardest part is believing that that's all excuses. So I'm sure you run into the same problem. You don't understand my industry. You don't understand my market. People aren't going to pay those prices. There's chuck in a truck. There's no way that's competitive. And how do you deal with that with owners, the mindset of you don't know my business. You don't understand, Aaron. Yeah, I get that every day, five times a day. Oh, we got a lot this weekend. So here's the deal. I'll give you an example. Let's just use garage doors. So let's say you're coaching me and I'm saying to you, man, you don't know the Nashville market. You don't know Tennessee. And you go, Aaron, it's working in Phoenix. And I heard Nashville's got money. I'm go, oh, you don't know. It's different. It's different. So I'm giving you this BS excuse. And what's the excuse for? I'm a victim ultimately. I'm probably a crappy boss and everything else. Whatever. So I'm giving you this excuse and you can tell. Anybody who's personally developed, by the way, when you're coaching or giving advice to another operator, you can tell the type of person they are as a boss. Like you can talk to them and go, this guy's not very sharp. This girl's not on it. They need some personal development. They don't know people. And so I can tell that a lot of times, or I might say they are developed, but they've lied to themselves. And I'm saying this to myself in my head. And I look them right in the eye and I go, the principles do not change, but the details do. They go, what? I go, the principles do not change, but the details do. And so let's think about it for a second. Let's say that garage doors are more expensive there than they are here. And it's because, let's just say your labor's more expensive. Well, then you might look at me and go, Aaron, you're gonna buy the same, clothe play door from so-and-so and you're gonna pay the same price I'm gonna pay. Now, ignoring the fact that you might get volume discounts. Let's just say two similar sized operators. And so, okay, I'll pay the same price. However, Aaron, and you're also, I'm gonna run Ford trucks, you're gonna run Ford trucks. Okay, but you're, maybe in Phoenix, the median income is higher. And I gotta pay my tax more, but it also means I get to charge more. And so it's working out. And then in Tennessee, my tax, you're paying $40 an hour, I'm paying $30 an hour. And you might look at me and go, Aaron, holy crap, you're getting extra 10 bucks an hour. You're gonna leverage that. And I go, oh, there's no way my customers won't pay it. There's no way. Well, let's stop and think for a second. Let's go to the home office of these two garage places. Your home office and your garage place, let's say my market is just awful and your market is great. You might be paying 20,000 a month for your warehouse with all your equipment and all your stuff. And mine, I'm out in the country, it's a poor market. Let's pretend it's not even Nashville. And I'm paying 3,000 a month. And I got twice the space you do, because it's dirt cheap. You're paying $40 an hour for an operator to answer the phone and be really slick and sell appointments. And I'm paying $15 an hour. We can just keep going down the list. My insurance is less, everything's less. So technically, you could run a higher gross profit and I could run a lower gross profit, but your bills are more. And so you might say, Aaron, I wanna clear my 20% net. And you clear your 20% net after you pay all your stuff. And for me, let's say that I'm not able to get as high gross profit. Let's say you're getting a 50% gross profit. I'm only getting a 45. But if you're getting a 50 and your overhead's 30% of your revenue, what if my overhead's only 25% of my revenue? If I'm only getting a 45% GP and my overhead's only a 25% of my revenue, I'm sorry, 25% of my overhead, then I can stop back and go, wait a second. So if I'm doing 100 grand a month, if I gross profit at only 45,000, Tommy gross profit at 50 at 45,000, if my overhead was only 25,000, I still made $20,000. Tommy had 50,000 of gross profit and his overhead was higher. He had 30,000 of overhead. He still net profit at $20,000. So holy crap, the principles are the same. The details are a little different, but the principles are the same. It all flushes out. And so I get frustrated with people like AdWords and your industry and my industry, they work in cities, they don't work in a small town. Direct mail though, kills it in the suburbs, kills it in the country. Does not work well in a downtown market. And we can go down radio, we can go down TV, we can talk about billboards, we can literally go down all this stuff. So what does it all come down to? The principles do not change. It's just a little minor details. And what happens is you're talking to some guy, he's trying to not just throw the details out, he's trying to throw the principles out the window. And you can't throw the principles out the window. Sales is sales, marketing is marketing, finances, finance, understanding how organization comes together to get the appointment, to get the guy there, to be organized. That's all the same. Doesn't cost any different. In fact, in some markets, people need to understand that while they may have more expensive rent, they might be getting the materials cheaper because there's a warehouse in their town with some dude out in the country is having to pay shipping to get his materials. And that's the thing, a lot of people I think miss, the principles don't change. It's just the little minor details. And they keep throwing the principle out the window and honestly, it's not right. They're throwing the baby out the bathwater and they need to slow down and pace themselves and just look at the little things that go, okay, you're right, Tommy. It's only this little thing that's different. The rest of it pretty much is all the same. I need to take your advice and do what you said. Hey guys, one quick thing before we get back to the episode. I wanna share a personal story from my childhood. When I was just seven years old, I remember watching my parents argue about bills and screaming at each other over money. Eventually they got divorced and my mom had to work three jobs to cover the bills. I made myself a promise then that money would never again be the reason I lost my family. But in trying to avoid their mistakes, I ended up making some of my own. I gave my business everything I had. I lost girlfriends over putting work first. I became trapped by the very thing I thought would set me free. I got a message recently from Cody Johnson who came to Freedom 2023 that really made me think. He said, the freedom event changed our family tree. It's gonna change my kids' family trees. When Cody said that, it hit me right in the gut because I know what it's like to be the kid whose family tree got broken. And that's the real reason I do the freedom event. To help guys like you break that cycle and build businesses that give you real freedom. We're three weeks away from Freedom 2025 in Vegas. Don't wait any longer to get the financial freedom and the free time you've been wanting. Go to freedomevent.com to grab your spot now. That's freedomevent.com. Now, back to the episode. How much of the business would you say, I think we always talk, you need the phone to ring and you need to convert customers, which is sales. When it comes to sales training, what are the things you really focus on? The presentation, the tonality, the giving options versus alternatives where they can only say yes or no, starting the work, building the ticket. What are the fundamentals to you to make a successful salesperson? Scripts are for people who cannot sell. People who can sell, scripts or guidelines. That's my first. But everybody who can or cannot sell must know the script. Second, curb selling, number one. If I can't get that car over the curb and if you guys can't get your van over the curb into their driveway, we don't have anything, either one of us. So we got to sell the appointment first. So that means we say yes. If a customer calls one of my shops and they said, hey man, how long for an oil chain? Let's get over there right now in my wife's car. And I turn around and my shop's blown out. I mean, I got cars under cars on the lift, cars in the parking lot on Jackson's, cars everywhere. I tell my clients, listen, listen Tommy, it's just one more car. If you tell Mrs. Jones, no, right now, she's gonna go down to so-and-so, some national franchise, have them change her oil, and then she'll never come to you again. It's about not just collecting, but keeping customers. So we tell her yes, absolutely is now a good time. So if you called me up and you said, hey Aaron, I'm gonna bring my dad's Chevy 1500 by, how much is it for a set of brakes? Absolutely, sir. What makes you think you need a set of brakes? And you go, well, it's squealing when it slows down from what my dad's telling me. Okay, not a problem. I can absolutely give you a free written estimate. No cost to you is now a good time. Is now a good time. Is now a good time. And you go, well, can you just give me a price? I'd just love to get a price over the phone, find out what I can do. I gotta tell my dad, I'm just helping him out, blah, blah, blah. Hey, totally, totally understand. I need to have that checked out by one of my ASC certified technicians is now a good time. I'm always now, now, since the urgency, now, I'm in a hurry, now, now, how can I take your pain away? I strike him with the iron's hot, the check-in's lights on now, the squeaking's on now. They're about to leave town now. It's about now, now, now. And that customer then is like, no, I really, I need that price. You know, is there any way you can give me that price before I come by? Absolutely, absolutely. At no cost to you, I'll give you that price. Is now a good time. And so I keep repeating this. And then if he gets frustrated and say, listen, Mr. Customer, wouldn't you rather compare two opinions versus two prices? And he's like, well, what do you mean? Well, if so-and-so has told you it's this much, and I tell you it's this much, you're just comparing prices. But what if it doesn't need breaks at all? The opinion's actually what matters more than the price. Yeah. When you show up at my shop, my shop's blown out because we are an honest ethical shop. There's so many cars, you're barely gonna be able to get in my parking lot. The quality of my business is evident when you get here. I will take care of you, Mr. Customer, and I will be honest with you because I don't need your money and you're gonna know that when you get here. And so there's a whole approach to if they're trying to get you to meet somebody else's pricing, et cetera, like if somebody's calling an HVAC guy and they're trying to get him to match a price on a evaporator coil or something, you don't want to get in that game. There's four ways to look at this. They're either calling you while the tech is at their house. And if you match that price, or you give them a price, they're gonna get that tech to just match the price and get the job. Or you're gonna tell them the price and you're gonna be higher and you're going to confirm they should go with that guy. And so then now you're the expensive guy they're never gonna call you again. Or you tell them that, hey, I can absolutely beat that price. You give them a price and then they show up and they look around and I'm sorry, they show up. You show up because I'm thinking about auto repair. So in the service industry, you show up, you get there, you look at it and you go, holy crap, this thing's totally misdiagnosed. You tell them what's really wrong. And it's four times as much. Now they're mad at you because it was all based on the other price. They want you to now match what you said on the phone to that lower price. And then the last possible thing out of the four is that you were right. The other diagnosis was accurate. It was just an evaporator coil. Your price was cheaper. You showed up, you got the job, you fixed it. So if you get into that game on the phone, 75%, so three out of four times, you are not going to win and get that customer. Only one out of only 25% of the time, are you gonna win that? So why even go down that game? Train your staff, no prices over the phone, always with an inspection in person, et cetera. Now once I've got the car, or for your guys once they're there, even if the customer goes to work, no big deal. We'll do that over the phone. But we've got possession of it, of the job. No way when they just call in. And so it is all about saying yes every time. And hey, I could also not say yes, but say yes. Like if you call me for an old change, I could go, oh man, could you leave it with me? Now squeeze you in. That doesn't give a customer confidence that you can take care of them. If somebody's water heater blows up, and they call you up and you tell them, if you can give me to the end of the day, we'll get somebody over there. That's not confidence. You'd be better to say at 5 p.m. we'll be there. It'll be late, but we'll be there at 5 p.m. You gotta give them confidence that the appointment's going to happen. That is saying yes. And so the number one thing in my opinion, besides curb selling, is the ability to say and back up yes. Because so many shops and so many businesses say no without saying it. And that's what's holding their business back. Yeah, it kills me when I see time slot not available when a client calls, but I literally, the second half of the service business is, I just was in Denver on Thursday, and I'm talking to this guy, he goes, dude, I got home at 11 last night. He's like, and to be honest, I couldn't finish the job, but I got it working. At least they could use their garage now. I gotta go back. And so there's this happy medium with capacity of, you guys need more training. They need to come back to Phoenix. Should they be on ride-alongs? Did they get hurt? Did they got a wedding coming up? And capacity planning with a guy that needs to drive out and not overwork them is the hardest thing. It's bad if you're underworking them and bad if you're overworking them. They can only handle so much of each. And that's, I always say that, what's the toughest thing about home service? Capacity planning. It's trying to match up the perfect. And then it's, if you get a client that says, I got a busted door, I don't care what it costs, I need to get out now. My rule is, if we got to cancel somebody, that's still the first question I ask is, are you able to get your car out of the garage? If I cancel and say, could we get out there tomorrow? Here's the situation, Miss Smith, she's 72 years old, she's stuck. We never cancel more than once. Okay, I just need to tune up. Or hey, yeah, my garage is working great on manual, but I can't, it's capacity plan. We're very good at it. But when I see the call center, we've got the software that tells us why we missed. And literally I just did a screenshot of the things that annoy me. One of the things is like service fees. We charge $40 to come out and diagnose the door. We'll get a certified technician, blah, blah, blah, blah. And if they say, listen, I don't want to pay to just find out if there's a problem. I know there's a problem. I'll say, listen, if we're in your area, what are your cross streets? You'll give me your cross streets. I've got a guy out there between this time and this time. I'll tell you what. Are you serious about getting the work then if we show up? Are you not a landlord, tenant situation? I just want to know, yes, you got the parts on the truck. You give me a price that's reasonable. Like that's all, then I'll weigh the service call. I know exactly what to do, but when I've got 70 people on the phones, 70 right now, and just training them and continuing to train them. We're at an 89% booking rate. It just kills me because I see a path to get to 93%. And when you think about that, that's 4%. If we do 300 million, that's $12 million. I mean, the number is now every percent counts. Same thing for cancellation rates, same thing for the conversion rate. I want to go to a different subject here because you put on a world renowned, I mean, it is spectacular, your events. And everybody, I will say, I've spoken at a lot of events. I feel like everybody's nice. I feel like it's definitely, in my opinion, shop owners right now. They're not in their 20s. I mean, there are some out there, but I feel like it's a little bit, maybe, you know, 40s, 50s, 60s, but they're all drinking the Kool-Aid. Tell me a little bit about the event. Who do you love to have speak? How was, I know you recently had Edmai Lat, I'm just curious. I've seen him speak. He's amazing, great guy from the insurance world. What were some of the guys and gals that have stood out and what are you trying to get? I know you're trying to get community. You're trying to get everybody together. It's important to feel part of something. But what's the goal? What do you love about it? What are your favorite things about the speakers? Yeah. We almost, a year ago said, we're gonna stop doing this event. It is so hard to pull off. And for those that are in the event business, they get it, but I will tell anybody who's wanting to do events, there's a wall around probably 300 people. And then you gotta get that next level of organization. It gets pretty, it gets hard. There's another one around 1,000, that 300 to 1,000, you can kind of maintain the same systems. And then the wall at 1,500 people is like 30 stories tall. It's like the wall of China. You know what I mean? It's just so hard to get over. And when you cross that, you'll get your butt handed to you if you don't have it dialed in. People don't understand that 1,800 people, 1,900 people, they're all little heaters and they break HVAC systems. They destroy bathrooms. Like you're going in and you're counting, you're putting your hand like, when I go to our hotel for an event, I literally, all those stupid digital sinks, I'm putting my hand under each one to see if they work. When we do an event there, we come in, we put paper towel holders on every single counter with those ones that stack up. We put bottles of soap in every counter because we can't depend on the little sensor ones because they have to time to work and they slow it down. I get lines of men all the way out the door. So every split second matters. We don't worry about the little trash can on the wall. We put in a big 50 gallon trash can for all the paper trash. We prop the door open. We don't have them opening it and shutting it. People don't get this, but it's a huge thing. I call all the restaurants in a three block radius, four weeks beforehand, every week for four weeks to remind them that there's a small town coming to these five hotels. To pull it all, all my own AV equipment, we got 600 grand with AV equipment. We outfit 15 classrooms with everything from a camera recording the guy speaking. So we'll have a mic for that, to another camera recording the room for level loading. We watch from a main spot all the different capacities of the rooms to make sure if one room gets super popular and the room has almost no one in it, we pull the popular group out and put them in a bigger spot. And we'll save a bigger room waiting to see, because we try to anticipate. We study titles and speakers to see who are the most popular titles and most popular speakers. So we found with a bad title, we can still pack a room even if the guy's not a good speaker. With a good title. Yeah, I'm sorry. Yeah, with a good title, said that backwards. And so, Well, give me an example of a great title. I'm just curious. You piqued my interest here. Yeah, yeah. Five ways AI can grow your shop in 2025. So, you know, and a bad title of the, something like, what would be a bad title for AI? I only think about the good stuff. I don't think about the bad stuff. Come learn how auto repair and AI can work together. Something like that, that would be a bad thing. Yeah. And numbers help, you know, you want, when you associate the five dirty secrets of AI and auto repair, you know, that helps that creates curiosity. Curiosity is the number one thing for marketing. People need to think about. Hallways with giant groups are a huge issue. You might think 15 feet wide is enough for a way to come around the corner. They won't all come at once. Not true. You can't have it ever pinched down less than 20 feet. I mean, it's just, I have to pay attention to all the vendors. Certain vendors don't like other vendors. So they can't be next to each other. I gotta put them way apart, you know? I have to pay attention to how it flows. I buy $90,000 in Mountain Dew Diet Coke, Dr. Pepper Diet, Dr. Pepper, Coca-Cola, Sprite and root beer, all on piles of ice, peanut m&ms, Snickers, you know, Rollos, granola bars, fruit, everything else from the hotel. $90,000 worth to hit my F&B minimum. And then I do everything else off site. I do, you know, the big bar with the barbecue across the way that you went over to us with us. The, everything I do out of the norm. I try to make sure the hotels are very affordable. I try to make sure there's lots of restaurant support close to the airport, right off the interstate. A lot of things I look for. And then I just need size. I will say as far as speakers go, and let me be, I need to wrap one little thing up and put a bow on it. We thought about canceling this event because it was so hard. But I had to remind my team, when you're the biggest event in the space, it brings a certain level of authority with it. And you cannot ignore that authority. That authority is real. That authority is, it's given to you by God. You're affecting that industry. And if you stop doing that, that goes away. And when you're in the room, and Jesse Itzler or Ed Milet or Tommy Mello or somebody who's, you know, aggressive is on the stage in the audience is really interactive. It makes a massive difference. They're the large, and you felt this yourself, Tommy, the larger the crowd, the more authority you feel to speak over the crowd. When you yell, hell no, you feel more authoritative. It's the power of an orator. And if you've never gotten on stage, you will understand this, but the crowd draws it out of you. So if you do a good job of curating the crowd, keeping the AC and the heat, being on time a year, perfect. Make sure the chairs are comfortable. The aisles are big enough. You give enough breaks. Like I run a massive conference with breaks. If you go to any of these huge conferences that Tony Robbins puts on anybody else, those conferences have no breaks. It's one giant session, no breakouts, and they never stop. Yeah, until midnight, until 2 a.m., yeah. Yeah, they never stop. By us getting everyone up and making everybody go to breakouts, and everyone up, and everybody come to breakouts. We do 45 minute teachings, 30 minute breaks. We do, this year we added a food court outside with bathroom trailers and coffee trailers and everything else. I covered all that, made it part of the event cost. All of that, it just made an incredible experience for the members and it allowed for networking. And then we blast the general session out and sound in certain spaces. Internet's a huge deal. We never offered internet till this year because that many people will take your internet down. We had to take the mission control for the stage from the back of the room to the front of the room, right next to the stage, just so it wouldn't interrupt the wireless mic. And at the back of the room, we only had sound control. And then a camera. So we had to change a lot of things up this year. You would have loved it. It was upgraded even more from last year. All that being said, as far as speakers go, the kind of speakers that I love are people with real life experience who are willing to get passionate on stage. I don't care about articulate. I don't care about their intelligence level. I care about their ability to connect with an audience, make them feel something and point them in the right direction. That's what I want. So Edmillett crushed it. Jesse, it's still crushed it. You crushed it last year. You were one of our highest ratings ever. So if y'all ever want to get a good speaker, Tommy's great. Bill Courtney was awesome. His nickname is Coach. Chris Voss was awesome. We had Marcus Lomonis, Mike Rowe. Mike Rowe was incredible. What a master storyteller. Incredible. Who else have we had? Dave Ramsey was incredible. We had Dave Ramsey out. He brought the house down. There's a lot of great speakers I'd love to have back. Phil M. Jones. Phil Jones is good. Michael McAlwix is good. I'm trying to remember them all. Andre Norman. Andre Norman was awesome. Oh yeah, Andre's a good buddy of mine. So yeah, we had Andre out. So point being, you want a speaker. And I will say this, the price of a speaker, I have swapped with a bunch of speakers before and say, I'll speak at your event, you speak at mine. Yep. But if you're hiring people that are just celebrity, just for anybody else who's putting on an event, I'll say this, you are not paying for their skill as a speaker, you are paying for their fame. The more famous they are, the more expensive they are. That does not mean they are the best speaker. I will just say that. And if you go down the list and you go, well, wait, Aaron didn't mention this person. That may be, I'm not mentioning that person because you can see who's been to my events. But the fame is what you pay for. The quality of the speaker, you might get a guy for 15 grand who blows away somebody who's 150 grand or 250. And so at the end of the day, you wanna research, find them on YouTube, listen to their stuff. Also try to find them without screen. You wanna just hear it. There's some power in just listening to someone talk. And then make sure from there that you think to the right fit for your audience. They don't have to know your industry. People are people. At the end of the day, I can speak to your audience. It'd be the same as you speaking to my audience. We're in the home services, blue collar, we get it, right? We grind it out. But I think that a lot of people are forgetting the power of events and huge events at that. COVID really screwed all that up. We have fought to bring them back. And this year it did get so hard to pull off. We questioned, should we just do two decent size events? I had four people that I know about that got saved this last event. We do a church service in the morning before all of it starts. And then we do an optional church service at like nine PM at night on the middle night. We also do a mindset talk on one of the middle nights, just talking about personal development. And this event, I didn't hear about any, but the one you were at last year, we had a group of people get baptized in the hotel pool. I mean, it was just like crazy crap happening. I tell people all the time, I joke, but we are an underground church with a mandatory offering. That's how it really is ran. And so, we give, and I sponsor people all the time. We probably sponsor anywhere from 40 to 50,000 a month in dues from people that are going through hard times. There's a responsibility that people don't always know when you start getting to this higher level, that it's pressure. And I know you know what it's like. You're carrying it, it's pressure. Trying to help all these people. And so, bottom line, events are powerful. Live events in person change lives, not on Zoom, in person. And they are needed. In the bigger the event, the more powerful the breakthrough. And it gets to become a pain in the butt. Big events are a pain in the butt. They're hard, they're hard. I mean, crap breaks, toilets break, toilets clog. People smoke in a bathroom and set off a smoke alarm and in the back, wait, it's all the air conditioning. Things go wrong. However, live events are worth it and they change lives. You know, some, three people have sent me that AI, no one's really gonna trust what they see and these in person, especially events are gonna become more and more important the next five years. And they're just gonna grow. And people are gonna get sick of just, is this AI, is this social media? They're just gonna want hopefully to interact. I mean, I know kids these days, they're on front of an iPad and they could go forever without leaving the house. But I think just my generation, we wanna be around people. We wanna just, and then you get the other people there and I know we gotta close up here, but you get the people that come to every single event, every event I've spoken at, they're at that event. I mean, they're at the one with 15 people, they're at the one with 300 there, that event they shouldn't even be at. And I'm like, are you working? I mean, have you applied any of this? You know what I mean? Have you seen those people? Oh dude, yeah. And you're like, you just need to go and focus. There was a guy who's really famous who has a group that gets to go with him to every event until their businesses go broke. And then they gotta go back to work. Yeah. Yeah, it's real, man, it's real. So just a couple of quick last questions. Number one, Aaron, I gotta do a session two with you because I only, like I love number one, eighth grade education and you're probably one of the top CFOs I've ever heard. I don't know if you've ever been called a CFO, but after this conversation, I've seen the numbers you crunch. And it basically is math. You just, you gotta turn a profit and you gotta come up with a mathematical formula. How do people reach out to you? They wanna just see more of you or just, what's the best way? Yeah, so we're in the process of launching a YouTube channel that is actually going live like this week and next week. So we'll be able to start following you there. They can find me on Instagram. I never posted on Instagram. I'm now starting to post there. They can find me on Facebook. I never did anything there, but the only they're gonna find me on Facebook, probably it will be to follow me. I probably won't take any more friend requests. But those are gonna be the easiest ways to track down all my stuff. We're gonna start putting out a lot of free content when it comes to YouTube. So that's where they need to start watching. That's probably gonna turn into probably several hundred pieces of content a month here in the next 30 days. So we've hired a pretty big and powerful crew for that. And I'm super excited about where that's about to go. I love it. Is there a book other than the Bible and E-myth and Rich Dad Poor Dad and probably another dozen, think you grow rich and I could go on and on of a good to grade. But is there a book that's out of the ordinary that you just are just really, really passionate about? Yes. The number one book I've seen help more people than any other book is the Five Pieces to Life Puzzle by Jim Rohn. It's a paperback, a quarter inch thick. That book, another one that's a favorite of mine, and they're both right here on the bookshelf, is Be My Guest by Conrad Hilton, how you built Hilton Hotels. Another great one, The Road Less Stupid by Keith Cunningham. That's a great one. You know what's so funny is I can't get enough. I was listening to an Audible book this morning and I just, I can't get enough. And I already, I'm by far books on my shelf that I haven't read because I'll buy them 30 at a time now. So last thing here, we talked about a lot of things and I do want to do a part two, but I want you to just, whatever's on your mind, whatever you think the audience needs to hear. I took so much from this. Number one, I'm going to make a lot of people listen to this, but maybe we didn't hit on a topic that's just high on your heart right now. I think the biggest thing with me right now, just kind of the hot button, is it's worth it. I'm going to leave it at that, it's worth it. And what I mean is as you grow your business, it gets hard and you agree with me and it gets hard. It's hard for me. We can't run our businesses the way we do today like we did yesterday. However, every new level I get to, I've never looked back and said, you know, I'm on level 14, I wish I was back on level 12. But every time I get to level 14 or 15, I look forward and go, do I really want to go to 16 or 17? I mean, is it worth the price? And I was talking to Ed Milet, I did a podcast with him after he spoke. And he said he actually told some people knowing some things because he said, he started to climb to the next rung and he said, it's just not worth the squeeze. And it made me think, was he overworking himself? Was this going on? Was that going on? What made him say that? What was going on in his personal life? And all those things can make you slow down. And they're valid reasons. You should stop. But I have to say, if I'm looking at levels 16 or 17, and right now they're scary, just like you, you're looking at level 18 or 19. That next level, it's always scary. For everybody, every level you get too scary. However, once you get used to it and settle into that level, you never are willing to go back. So to all the people that are following you right now, that are listening to Tommy driving around and maybe you own a little plumbing company and you're trying to take some of his advice or you own an HVAC company and trying to take advice. You own a garage store company and trying to take advice. I would just ask yourself, I'll think about, even with all the frustrations and all the pains, how far you've come, look back at where you started and say, would I ever want to go back at all? Because at one point, when you were just a guy on a truck, the next level looked scary. And you're there now. So let's look backwards and remind ourselves, we don't want to go backwards. And so while the future is scary, it's worth stepping into. Take courage, try this new thing that maybe you've heard Tommy suggest. Try this new angle, just embrace it. Just trust and embrace it. Because think about your past, you've never regretted how far you've come. So let's now start now. I got one quick side note, just real quick about it, my let and I have heard him talk and say, I could work three six hour intervals and he goes from six to 12, whatever it is, that I work three days to year one. And I'm thinking to myself, my time does not equal outcome. My time behind a desk, my time, how well can I lead and delegate and build a business? And I think that might be one of the reasons that he's going, I can't fit four days into six hours. That would be 24 hours a day. And he's always said, and I know he's changed a lot, but he's like, I could outwork you. And I've never, that changed about five years ago for me. It's not about how hard I could work, it's how well I could lead, get people to buy in and delegate and have everybody win. And I think I wouldn't want to go to the next level of working hard because that's just burnout, that's nutty. But hey man, I really appreciate it. I'm sorry I was late. I think you're world class. I'm gonna definitely have you speak at an event, actually my big event. I'm lining it up here right after we get off this, but I appreciate you very much my man and I appreciate our friendship. I appreciate you. It was great having you out last week guys, props to Tom. I flew all the way out in person to be on my podcast, even though something else fell through. And so I really appreciate Tommy and your whole team was great, Brie's great. Yeah, it was awesome man. It was awesome. Yeah, and Ed has changed his tune by the way. When he was there, he feels like he's coming out of that grind culture. And he said that to me. Well, the deal is, when me and Brie got back, Brie goes, I really, really love them. She's like, I wanna like do some stuff outside of work with them. So that's a good sign, cause it's very rare that she says that. My wife actually said the same thing about Brie. She's like, she's pretty cool. It is the same thing. What's cool for both of us is, I think we both done a good job of staying down to earth and not forgetting where we came from. That's right. That's the difference. I gotta tell you all, Tommy can eat some hot wings, bro. Oh my God. He's tearing off those paper towels and wiping it off the sweat. Yeah, that got me. What was that place called? Hattie B's. Hattie B's. Hattie B's. He loaded down that deal. He loaded down. I ate him. I'll be seeing you soon, man. I'll reach out to you later this week. All right, man. Take it easy. I'll see you. Thanks, buddy. Appreciate you.